Tornado leaves 3 dead in Missouri

ST. LOUIS (AP) – A man and his two adult sons died when a tornado obliterated a mobile home in southeast Missouri, officials said Tuesday.

By Adam Vogler, AP

A donkey wanders through debris in the back yard of Loy Miller's home after a tornado passed through the area in Diehlstadt, Mo. on Tuesday. The storm struck late Monday, killing three men, including Miller.

By Adam Vogler, AP

A donkey wanders through debris in the back yard of Loy Miller's home after a tornado passed through the area in Diehlstadt, Mo. on Tuesday. The storm struck late Monday, killing three men, including Miller.

The twister was part of a storm that struck Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky late Monday, but hit hardest in the tiny village of Diehlstadt, in Scott County, where the three men were killed.

Scott County Sheriff Rick Walter said the mobile home was smashed beyond recognition.

"The frame was probably 100 yards away from where it was sitting," Walter said. "It was just debris everywhere. It just obliterated it."

Missouri State Highway Patrol Trooper Clark Parrott identified the deceased as 70-year-old Loy Miller, the owner of the trailer, and his sons, Jasper Miller, 50, and Randy Miller, 48. Parrott said it wasn't clear if the sons also lived in the mobile home.

"We had a pretty intense, concentrated storm," Parrott said.

An 11-year-old St. Louis County girl suffered minor head and arm injuries after being pelted by huge chunks of hail.

The gusty storm developed in the St. Louis area Monday afternoon, producing nearly an inch of rain and pingpong-sized hail in some places while leaving others bone dry, National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Sanders said. Hail, about an inch of rain and winds stronger than 50 mph were also reported in parts of southern Illinois and northwestern Kentucky.

The storm became particularly intense in southeast Missouri, and Diehlstadt, a village of 163 residents about 100 miles south of St. Louis, took the worst of it. The weather service said 52 homes and several businesses in the Diehlstadt area had damage, mostly to roofs. A church lost its steeple, and dozens of trees were uprooted or snapped.

Downed power lines closed Highway 77 for several hours, Parrott said. Power was restored before dawn.

The weather service determined the EF-2 tornado was 75 yards wide and had peak winds of 115 mph. Witnesses told Walter they saw a tornado dip down and strike the trailer, then bounce back up and dip down again elsewhere.

The storm was very much hit-and-miss. In the St. Louis area, Chesterfield on the east side of the Missouri River saw a downpour of sideways-blowing rain and hail around 4:30 p.m.; Weldon Spring, on the other side of the river, was virtually dry.

Monday's storm was so spotty that it did virtually nothing to relieve moderate to severe drought conditions in the area.

"We need a couple of inches of rain, big-time," Sanders said. "Heading into May we were above normal rainfall, but May just really killed it."

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

View the original article here

Joplin tornado chaos leaves hundreds still missing (Reuters)

JOPLIN, Mo (Reuters) – On the wall of the Red Cross shelter in Joplin was taped a poster with a picture of Emma Marie Hamp-Haines, on which someone had scrawled "FOUND."

Hamp-Haines was reunited with her daughter at the center on Wednesday, three days after a huge tornado carved a path of destruction through the city of 50,000 people known as a waystation on historic "Route 66."

"That made it worth it, to see a family brought together," said Amie Houston, a Missouri State University student, who watched the reunion.

The meeting of mother and daughter was a welcome happy ending in a town where too many other stories have ended in shock and tears.

By Thursday, nearly 100 hours after the deadliest tornado in the United States in 64 years, officials were still trying to find 232 people unaccounted for. State officials criticized for problems with information made available to the public swept in new resources Thursday.

"We will keep a relentless focus on the search, rescue and identification of those 232 people, and we will not rest until everyone has been accounted for, and that number is zero," Governor Jay Nixon said.

Getting accurate information out of the six-mile-long scar left by Sunday's tornado has been a struggle. Cell phone service was spotty, landlines dropped and electric power remained cut for thousands across the city.

Local radio filled with callers hunting for friends and family. A Safe and Well list maintained by the Red Cross had more than 1,800 names registered and more than 79,000 searches by Thursday morning, spokesman Jim Rettew said.

Searchers hung five posters, including that of Hamp-Haines, on a glass case behind the Red Cross workers.

"One of the first questions we're asking is 'Have you notified your family? Do they know you're safe?'" Rettew said.

MISSING NUMBER PROBLEMS

Governor Nixon said Thursday the number of missing had fallen as stories like Hamp-Haines's came to light. He acknowledged the frustration and confusion over initial estimates of a staggering 1,500 missing reported for two days following the tornado.

As briefings continued for the media, the number of missing did not decline. Then on Wednesday, officials abruptly stopped giving out a figure at all.

State officials directed 60 investigators starting on Wednesday to work around the clock to deliver Thursday's more accurate number, Nixon said.

"We have absolutely no reason to hide anything from anybody," Nixon said.

Debbie Cummins, great-grandmother of 16-month-old Skyular Logdson, who was finally identified in a morgue on Wednesday, said she and others have tried for two days to verify with coronors' representatives that he has been located, as relatives of the boy's father have said.

"I want to know when there's going to be that next press conference because I want to ask 'where are our loved ones?'" Cummins said on Thursday. "I want to know this and not just for myself and our family. We can't get any answers."

Some of the remains recovered were in very poor condition, Nixon told reporters. Morgue workers, including a federal team, were working to ensure there were no incorrect identifications, he said.

"I don't know what you say to someone who was sitting at home eating dinner and heard the sirens and haven't seen their loved ones since," Nixon said.

The official death toll from the tornado had risen by one to 126 on Thursday, with the addition of Skyular. More than 900 were injured, according to government officials in Joplin. It was the eighth deadliest tornado in U.S. history.

Houston, the Red Cross shelter worker, was one of the lucky ones. She spent hours after the storm making phone calls and slowly locating her friends from school. Some of them managed a reunion at the shelter.

There wasn't a lot of talking," Houston said. "We didn't even need to say anything. It was the fact that we were all together."

(Editing by Greg McCune and Jerry Norton)

View the original article here